


o brave new world

by sunshine_states



Series: apocalypse how [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Soft Apocalypse, Spoilers for E160, excessive metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 11:40:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21298850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshine_states/pseuds/sunshine_states
Summary: Humanity adjusts. The Entities have Regrets.
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Series: apocalypse how [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1570090
Comments: 47
Kudos: 230





	o brave new world

Think of it as liquor.

Think of it as a bottle of Hungarian spirit distilled from cherries, honey-brown bourbon, a dark-red, too-strong wine. Think of it as gin pressed from juniper, sharp and biting and consumed all at once.

Humanity is not a virus; humanity is a potent brew formed over millennia, distilled from the ferment of choices and loves and hatreds and fears and ideas. But this is a metaphor that the Powers would not necessarily understand. Not at first.

An English professor falls to the Spiral, and for weeks the walls of the Globe Theater are black with sonnets, etched in a thin, obsessive chickenscratch, because she visited as a girl and the sight of it has never left her. The Buried dreams deep, slow dreams of water under the earth, of diamonds, and aches with a new and unfamiliar desire to _dig _and _cut _and _polish_ and _appraise_. The gem prospector pinioned in its depths always loved a rare jewel. In Nevada, an abandoned mine foams gold.

Basira finds Daisy in Sussex. She’s fiddling with her phone and cursing, overlong talons clumsy on the touchscreen.

“Are you here to kill me?” she asks without looking up.

Basira doesn’t move. “Yes.”

“Can it wait?” Daisy says, sounding faintly irritated. She holds up the phone. She’s playing Monument Valley. “I am _so close_ to beating this level.”

“Is this…” Basira can’t quite believe the words are leaving her mouth, but, “the Hunt?”

“Yeah, well.” Daisy’s grin is fanged. “That whole – compulsive need to pursue a goal, you find a way around it. Don’t think nameless terrors from beyond the skin of reality knew much about video games.”

The Hunt is the easiest to suborn. Its avatars collect stamps and old books and insects. One of them makes a game of hunting down Leitners and destroying them. Another befriends an avatar of the Eye and goes looking for rare and endangered frogs, because the world might have ended but she still has a thesis on chytrid fungus to write.

The Powers try, and sometimes succeed, to reel their errant humans back into more familiar cycles of fear and violence. But it’s not like before. It’s not like tasting humanity in capfuls. This is the entire bottle, the full bouquet of flavor that sommeliers write about in guidebooks, the terror and the love and the loathing and the bright, vicious ingenuity that tamed wolves and kindled fire. And if the Powers are focused on the humans, the humans are also, quite abruptly, focused on _them_.

There are spiderwebs shrouding a tree in Siberia, and an avatar of the Vast is lying in their shadow, blissfully contemplating his insignificance in the grand scheme of the universe. How comforting, he thinks, that this is just one dust-speck of a planet out of billions. How wonderful the empty spaces between the stars. How full of promise.

**Author's Note:**

> Quote from "The Tempest," because I am pretentious.


End file.
